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Saturday, August 28, 2010

We took the L train from Lorimer Streeta few stops southeast this afternoon to the start of the Second Annual McKibbin Street Fair on the block of the McKibbin Lofts.The street fair is a project of Potion Collective, an evolving, diverse community of musicians and artists based in Bushwick whose mission is to support and nurture the arts by creating outlets for artists and enthusiasts across all mediums to develop, produce and promote their art.It was a fun event and we're sure since we were there before things got hopping, it's even livelier and crowd-filled about now. As the New York Times wrote a couple of years ago,

To spend a few days at the McKibbin lofts is to experience what it is to be young, hungry for acceptance, and willing to put up with just about anything in order to gain a foothold in the city’s competitive, and thriving, underground art and music scenes. This could have been Greenwich Village 60 years ago, or SoHo 30 years ago, or the East Village in the 1990s.

When we got there, the band Miss ng was performing on the McKibbin stage on the north side of the street, and then Erik Meier did a set on the Potion stage on the south side of the street.We enjoyed them both and really liked Miss ng's cover of "Go Ask Alice," but then we're like sixty years old so what would you expect.The age factor also made us tired after teaching last night and this morning at Brooklyn College, so we stayed about an hour and then went back to Lorimer Street for what we know nobody else at the McKibbin Street Fair needed: a nap.But it's really thrilling to live in Brooklyn at a time like this when interesting stuff and people are all around us. And while we were there, there was a lot to see, like great dancing.Artist/Poet/Emcee/Bboy Nelson "CHIEF 69" Seda was doing body art.And even a fairly established artist like Antonio Tovar was there with some of his beautiful work.Sadly, while we were on McKibbin Street, nobody was playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkeyor hopscotch - yet, anyway.But there was a lot more going on.We thought the McKibbin Street Fair was a lot of fun even for old people, at least those who can appreciate things like the songs by Erik Meier (joined later by Bill Batholomew), which were really good. We are grateful to Potion Collective for being in Bushwick and would have liked to stay longer if we had been younger and less tired.The street fair was the bomb, something we'd like to see in other places.